1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a gate driver circuit and a display device having the gate driver circuit. More particularly, the present invention relates to a gate driver circuit capable of reducing a size thereof and a display device having the gate driver circuit.
2. Description of the Related Art
A liquid crystal display (“LCD”) device includes an LCD panel. The LCD panel includes an array substrate, a color filter substrate facing the array substrate, and a liquid crystal layer disposed between the array substrate and the color filter substrate. The array substrate includes a plurality of gate lines transferring gate signals, and a plurality of data lines transferring data signals. The data lines cross over the gate lines and are insulated from the gate lines.
The LCD device further includes a gate driver circuit outputting the gate signals to the gate lines and a data driver circuit outputting the data signals to the data lines. In general, the gate driver circuit or the data driver circuit is formed in a chip mounted on the LCD panel.
The gate driver circuit is formed directly on the LCD panel in order to reduce a size of the LCD device and enhance productivity.
The gate driver circuit formed on the LCD panel includes a shift register having a plurality of stages electrically connected to each other. As a size of the LCD device increases, the gate driver circuit must include two shift registers disposed at first and second end portions of the gate lines, respectively. The two shift registers output gate signals alternately to the gate lines.
The stages include a plurality of transistors and a plurality of capacitors. A number of the transistors determines a size of the gate driver circuit. Furthermore, when the LCD panel includes two shift registers, a number of transistors forming a stage further increases, thus a gate driver circuit having two shift registers with an increased number of transistors per stage increases in size. Therefore, an LCD device must also increase in size to accommodate the gate driver circuit.